Do we see ourselves as others see us?

If there are two sides to people’s personality -- a nonconscious and a conscious one, each producing unique behavior -- then it is interesting to consider how other people get to know us. People could from impressions form our automatic, uncontrolled actions that reflect our implicit motives and traits (e..g., our implicit need for affiliation), or they could form impressions from our controlled, deliberative actions that reflect our explicit motives. It seems likely that people attend at least in part to behaviors that emanate from the adaptive unconscious. If so, other people might know us better than we know ourselves. As a character ‘Straight Man’ said, “The truth is, we never know for sure about ourselves . . . only after we’ve done a thing do we know what we’ll do. . . Which is why we have spouses and children and parents and colleagues and friends, because someone has to know us better than we know ourselves. ~ Page 84

One reason people fail to predict their own behavior very accurately is that they believe that they are “holier than thou” and would be more likely than the average person to perform moral acts of kindness. Another is that people use different kinds of information when predicting their own versus other people’s behavior. When predicting other people’s actions, we rely mostly on our cumulative experience on how the average person would act, including our hunches about the kinds of situational constraints people will face. When predicting our own actions, we rely more on our “inside information” about our own personalities. This can be a problem for two reasons “ relying only on inside information causes people to overlook situational constraints on their actions, such as the possibility that they, too, will fail to pass by someone selling the flowers; second, as we have seen people’s inside information is not the full story about their personalities and might not be completely accurate. ~ Page 85/86